At the time I got married, 13 years ago, I lived in a flat. I liked it cos it was a short walk from the train station. Good for getting home after late nights out.
My wife moved in. One day she said, "The only problem with this flat is that it's a long walk from the station."
Long?
Turns out it's short if you go thru the woods & by the dark underpass, a route a woman would never think of taking.
And that was my 1st lesson in how we inhabit the same space but live in different worlds.
@rwg how easy was it to vote from abroad?
@rwg Is that for real or just a story the Australian Tourist Board has put out to attract immigrants? 
I see lots of Americans with "I voted" stickers. Do they give them to you at the polling station? Is it like the dentist? Do you get a lollipop too?
Do you have some things that your brain just refuses to learn?
For me, it's pivot tables. I am comfortable with lots of very complicated, convoluted things, but my brain obstinately refuses to learn what a pivot table is.
This is something I should know, but genuinely don't. I've lived half my life in Britain and half my life in Nigeria. I feel 100% British and 100% Nigerian. I know that I can describe myself as just British or just Nigerian, but if I'm going to hyphenate it, what determines which comes first? When I'm in Britain, am I Nigerian-British or British-Nigerian?
I hate these Handa books. They're pretty much the only African* books that they read in British primary schools. And, you guessed it, they're set in villages of mud huts and wild animals and primitive innocence.
And we wonder why Brits think Africa is backwards.
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* The author isn't African. (However, I'm not accusing her of having malicious intentions.)
DIVERSITY OBSESSION IS DESTROYING UNIVERSITIES, SAYS CAMBRIDGE DON.
Here are 4 photos - A, B, C and D. You get only one guess as to which of them is this anti-diversity Cambridge professor.
Today I saw this book about Black British History. There was a photo of George Berry, described as London's 1st Black pub owner.
Immediately I felt superior - cos I'd read on Mastodon about John London, a Black London publican from the 18th century.
Can't wait to post about this, I thought; everyone will think I'm so clever.
Googled George Berry & found a photo of him in ruins. Racists burnt down his pub.
Racists wouldn't let him enjoy his pub - or me my smugness.
As a child, I went to a boarding school in Jos, Nigeria, where I was bullied mercilessly because I had a foreign (British) accent.
One guy made me sleep on the concrete floor under his bed, saying I had to drink a full bucket of water before he'd let me go.
Years later, in uni, I saw him again and I went COLD with fear.
He, on the other hand, gave me a wide smile; he was seeing an old "friend".
By this time I was twice his size & could've put him in my pocket, but I could barely speak.
Walking my kids to their primary school every morning¹, we pass by groups of other kids going to school - primary, secondary and college.
The young, primary school children usually walk in friend groups, irrespective of gender or race.
The secondary school kids mostly walk in gender groups.
The older kids walk, almost exclusively, in race groups - Blacks, whites, Asians.
___________
¹ I live in a small town; your bigger cities might be different.
@davidpnice What was the rest of the country like?
The city of Timbuktu in Ancient Mali was legendary - its wealth, its culture, its architecture. Its university attracted scholars from as far as Spain, and from all over the Islamic world.
Whispers of its greatness spread as far as England - but it sounded so fantastic that the English assumed it must be mythical, like Atlantis or El Dorado.
It blows my mind that even today, 800 years later, many British people think Timbuktu is a distant made-up place.
One sad consequence of global migration is the distance - literal & metaphorical - it puts between kids and their grandparents.
Growing up in East London, I never learned to speak Igbo, and since my grandparents couldn't speak English, we never had a real conversation before they died.
It's different with my kids; their grandparents speak English. But grandmas show love through food - and so they cook amala, ewedu, asaro - when all my kids want are chicken nuggets.
I have a colleague who is a l̶o̶u̶d̶* conspiracy theorist. He is currently letting the whole office know that the *real* reason the Titanic sunk was that there were 3 US Federal Reserve officials on board and "the powers that be" wanted to stop them from changing the interest rate.
Is this a new conspiracy theory? I'd never heard it before.
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* redundant word. All conspiracy theorists are loud.
Britain is hugely ignorant about Africa, despite the fact that our histories have been intertwined for centuries. In the past this willful ignorance was apparent in the casual racism - thinking Africa is populated by bare-breasted natives who live in huts. These days Britain pretends Africa doesn't exist.
Doctor Who can travel anywhere in space and time. Never goes to Africa.
Race Across The World spends a whole season in one country - Canada. Hasn't been to Africa.
To non-Brits, Black History Month is in October in Britain.
I'm conflicted about the concept, if I'm honest.
1. We're only 3% of the population, Indians/Pakistanis are close to 9%. Why don't we have an Indian History Month. Or is this something that we've just imported, without thought, from America?
2. BHM is an excuse to silo us, to excuse the fact that the curriculum undermines us at every stage.
Every year, during Black History Month, British kids "learn" about MLK, Rosa Parks & Mary Seacole.
This year I'm going to my kid's class to talk about Ancient Mali:
Sundiata - from cripple child to empire builder.
Mansa Abu Bakr - the emperor who gave up the throne to discover the Americas, 200 years before Columbus.
Mansa Musa - the richest man in all of history.
